ABSTRACT
This chapter provides some important background to the root metaphor identified as organicism. The basic metaphor is the organism, the living, organized system presented to experience in multiple forms. Organicism has a long history, as reflected in the earliest writings of Greek philosophers about concepts such as vitalism, though this idea of a vital force is contentious. The emergence of new phenomena at each new level of organization that are not commensurate with a reduction to a lower level of organization is a feature of organicism. The organicist outlook also emphasizes that the individual's world moves through increasing levels of integration, that individuals are agents in constructing their reality and that there is some structural interdependence to the parts of development. A key feature concerns the universal features of human development, although Havighurst introduced a cultural-historical note. The notion of emergent properties is not uncontested either, as it creates difficulty for the more deterministic organicists.
